Assessment #2

Since the assessment for week 7 that I posted to my blog on the 23rd of April I have been working on my sites every few days. I’m going to miss posting to them; every time I find something of interest or think of something to look up on the net, my first thought is that I can use whatever it is for MPI104!

Summarising the work completed since the 23rd of April:
- My blog has increased by 25 postings, taking the total to 47.
- My my Delicious account has increased by 36 to a total of 56 bookmarks, spread over 12 bundles.
- My Fickr account had 79 photos, then when it reached the maximum of (free account) 200 images, I had to delete a lot make way for new ones, taking its current total to 159 images which have been organized into 3 sets.

Functionally, changes to my blog include an updated sidebar that includes links to fellow MPI104-2007 students in Friends (most if not all); and a Favourite’s link. The site counter has been changed to enable me to access site statistics (details).

From an aesthetic perspective I did try other templates (see here) and alterations to my current template but found that the one I’m using is still the most aesthetically pleasing to me. I did, however, rearrange the sidebar contents into a more logical format, with Blog Archive at the top, instead of Friends, which has now moved to the bottom of the sidebar. I would like to be able to make the Friends section into a scrollable window, to reduce the physical size it takes up on the blog page, but am unable to work out how through “Customise” and I don’t know enough HTML to do it myself. I also added the RSS feed for my Delicious site.

Some of my more interesting links include a Those were the Days story in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3; a Mature Age rant; and a look at Sadomasochism.

Still interesting, but on a lighter note (pun unintended) there are the posts featuring The Piano Juggler; Phil Collins and a familiar tune by Queen.

Delicious appears to have no capabilities for improving your sites' aesthetics, except through function. By this I mean that by bundling tags and then collapsing their categories, the site is visually tidier.

The same can be done with “Your Network” and “Your Fans”, all of which I’ve done.


I’m unable to work out how to clear “Links saved for you by other people” – I tried saving all of them and then deleting the ones I didn’t want from my bookmarks, but they still appear on the save for you page, stopping me from ‘tidying up’ this page. The Subscriptions page can be neatened by creating labels for types of Subscriptions and grouping them appropriately.


I believe my Delicious account meets the 'interestingness' criteria because of the breadth of websites that are bookmarked: comedy, sculpture, tutorials that can help me in my studies, research that has enabled me to integrate Delicious into my workflow. Additionally I have 1 of a kind bookmarks such as Joseph Merrick, jewellery making and The Eagles.

Flickr has provided me with a challenge of sorts; by uploading images for my GRP224-2007 workflow (which I initially perceived to be a good thing) I discovered that the maximum number of photos for a free account is 200, leaving me with the decision as to which photos could be deleted over which ones I really wanted to keep. My current total of 159 images has been put into 3 sets (General and downloaded, Craft and Uni related), facilitating searches. My current uni courses GRP224-2007 and MPI104-2007 both have images uploaded to Flickr as part of them.

Aesthetically I chose to have the sets present in the home page,


rather than have all small images, which I used when working on the site earlier.


My Flickr interestingness is due to the same eclecticism that is present in my Blog and Delicious sites. I have images of my crafts which I feel are interesting to other like-minded crafters. A comparison of the student-rated aesthetically pleasing Technorati top 100 is of interest to members of MPI104-2007. I have design-related images, images of contemporary musicians, animals and images that are simply pleasing.

While I don't believe that I know the full potential of these sites, I've enjoyed discovering their applicability, and time permitting, will continue to use them, especially Delicious whose usability potential for students is astounding.

Changes to site

No matter how many time I go into customise to change elements of my blog, I still come back to what I currently have. The current blog does have changes made to it from when I first set it up, but none since the first assessment.






None are as aesthetically pleasing to me (without masses of fiddling around) as the blog is now, although I did go in and change fonts and colours, without any aesthetic improvement.

Blog visitors

As I mentioned in this post I didn't realise the counter I'd been using since the middle of the first part of the semester was as useful as tits on a bull. I therefore don't have many statistics to report from Sitemeter, which I joined on the 28th of May.
What I do have is as follows:



Further than this, my visitors have been primarily from Australia, with 9 from the US, 1 from Canada, 2 from Germany, while Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Italy and the Philipines all provided me with 1 visitor apiece. Quite an ecelectic bunch, or is this range of country of origins normal?

Visitors found their way into my site primarily from my home page. Other entries were for the entry on penis splitting (3), Firefox (5), counter (3) and aesthetics (1).

The longest visit was for 144:32 and the second longest for 52:17, and they were both me, I know this because I am online with my blog at the moment, coinciding the the longest visit (oh, and I can see at the "who's on your site page"). 20 of the 36 visits timed in at 00:00.....

Disapointing, I'm glad I'm not using my blog for business purposes, as so many of the blogs I looked at from the Technorati top 100 list were.

Metablog favourite

I thought I'd save whoever is marking my work a bit of time by including an image showing that the ba-ma metablog is a favourite on my Technorati account as well as provide a link to it.

Firefox

Joh,
to continue with my metablog comment; my problem with Firefox is that it doesn't load well at CSU. I'm computer-less at home at the moment, so I have no alternative but to use the Jack Cross computers. I tried loading the sites that we are working within with the following results, all within a 5 minute timeframe:

Blogger with Firefox
Blogger with Safari
Flickr with Firefox
Flickr with Safari
Delicious with Firefox
Delicious with Safari

I have also had similar problems in the VPA labs. With the above dificulties, I can't check my sites in Firefox, so I've done my best in Safari.

Thanks
Bonnie

DPI

With a background in the printing industry and a future in the graphic design industry I've decided to try and work out the difference between DPI, PPI and what I used to know as "screen ruling" - LPI.

I know that DPI refers to dots per inch and the greater the number of dots, the finer the detail will be. But how does this relate to the physical size of an image? Wikipedia states that inkjet printers (the most common type of personal and small business printer) are mostly capable of up to 360 DPI.

PPI stands for pixels per inch and refers to the measurement of a video display, but is more commonly called DPI.

"The DPI measurement of a printer often needs to be considerably higher than the pixels per inch (PPI) measurement of a video display in order to produce similar-quality output. This is due to the limited range of colours for each dot typically available on a printer." Because of the differences in the RGB colour system of a monitor which can produce 16,777,216 colours and CMYK system of a printer which can produce 8 colours (CMYK, brown [c+y+m], blue, green and red); "most printers must therefore produce additional colours through a halftone or dithering process". (DPI is also used incorrectly when examining the scanning process. About.com and Wikipedia refer to the accurate measurement as SPI - samples per inch, but i'm not considering that here.)

LPI refers to lines per inch and measures the number of lines in a halftone grid. The higher the LPI, the better the image quality. Newspapers used to be 85 LPI, standard quality colour printing was 150 LPI.

The closest information I could find regarding the relationship of DPI and LPI was from My Design Primer "A bitmap image's resolution should be twice the linescreen." For example, "a color magazine would require an image be 300dpi for best reproduction at 150lpi." Desk Top Publishing has a chart to get an idea of the typical LPI needed based on method of printing and type of paper.

All in all, a very unsatisfactory investigation, I really needed someone with me who could explain in person, but at least I've bookmarked some sites that can help me to sort out individual scenarios when i come across them.

Counter

I was using a counter with Easy Hit Counters that I'd installed prior to the first assessment. With todays class and a second look at what this counter service provides, I realised that I may as well have had no counter at all because there was no way to gather any statistics. So, I'm changing counters to Sitemeter. When I closed off Easy Hit I had 145 visits. Because of the poor quality of my original counter I can't determine how many of those hits were from myself or from others.

That will change from now on.

Technorati ratings update

I'm getting more popular - I now have 3 authorities and have gone from a rank of 2,090,250 to 1,504,548!!! I'm jumping for joy!!!

Those were the days part 3

The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... the first part & the second part
The third person to live with me in Lakemba was Mark, a really great guy. We moved from there to a ‘secure’ apartment building in Burwood, (still in Sydney) with about 12 or 15 floors. The building had a body corporate that was quite strict and we had to sneak my cat in. Every time we had someone come to the door we had to hide her, especially as the ‘secure’ part of the building – having a key to get in to the front door or having to buzz the apartment you wanted – didn’t usually work. All ‘guests’ had to do was wait for a resident to open the door and make an excuse about having forgotten their key and the (usually) older tenants would happily help.

While in Burwood I held my first party; I slaved all day marinating chicken wings and making meatballs and didn’t have anything to eat all day. Needless to say, approaching party time, I downed a few wines and not long into the party found myself in bed, as sick as a dog with all the alcohol having gone straight to my head. Fortunately my mother was a guest and she took over for me. It was a bit embarrassing as my boss was also there, but had a positive consequence, because one of the guys who came as a guest of Marks became a boyfriend for a time. He very attentively looked after me while I was recovering in bed… Nothing too serious though, all the guests were coming in to see me and mum kept coming in to find out what else I wanted done.

This particular boyfriend had a motorbike – I don’t remember what kind anymore, but it was turbo charged (nearly thrown off the back many times) and being very enthusiastic and anal about his bike, he refused to have anything other than the grab bar at the back, which was like having your wrists tied together behind you. You had that or hold onto him. Oh, and if my clothes didn’t go with the colour of his bike, well….

We were at Burwood for about a year during the time of the bicentennial celebrations when we watched the special air force planes fly overhead from our 9th floor balcony.

The next stop was 1 suburb towards Sydney – Croydon and it was here that my accommodation-sharing days really took off. Mark and I moved into a great federation-style 3 bedroom house with a huge enclosed veranda at the back that we used as a 4th bedroom. 2 girls joined Mark and me; Kathy; a Novocastrian with a sometimes boyfriend and Karen; a country girl with a uni-student boyfriend. Kathy was (and hopefully still is) a pretty laid back girl who introduced me to lots music that was just outside the top 20 type of stuff I tended to listen to – REM is one that stands out. Karen, on the other hand was into heavy metal in a very full-on way. She used to listen to it really softly in her bedroom, which still seems to me to be a complete contradiction, while she read romance novels. I saw quite a few metal bands during those years, including Christian thrash (another contradiction), which is what her boyfriend was into.

Going to gigs was the go during the Croydon years – yes, I actually did live in 1 place for more than a year (but I can’t remember how long it actually was). One of our favourites was The Croydon; a local pub within walking distance that used to have Irish bands on Sunday nights. The place would be wall-to-wall footballers and Irish – it was absolutely great – the atmosphere, lots of alcohol, great music and just a walk home.

Used to go out quite often with mates from work, too. A favourite haunt when we went out was the pub across the road from the Balmain tigers footy club (can’t remember the name). We used to see Tommy Emanuel and his brother Phil, the Bondi Cigars and loads of other blues bands. The night was always finished off with a hot dog, the likes of which you don’t see anymore – a roadside vendor with sauerkraut, onions, pickles, cheese and anything else you could want on a hotdog. They were really, really good.

Had a couple of parties here, but the one that remains strongest in my memory was a ‘black party’. The food was typical party fare, but everything else was back; decorations, clothes and we used black ultraviolet light bulbs and black candles. We were cleaning candle wax off the carpet for ages.

One party that Mark and I went to that was the best party I’ve ever been to was a Halloween cocktail party. Everybody was told to bring a specific type of spirit or liqueur. They had a couple of blenders, lots of ice, juice and fruit and cocktail recipes plastered all over the walls. They also had lots of dry ice and stuff that looked very like cobwebs and cool coloured lighting and Halloween-themed decorations. Nobody left sober, that much was certain, but it was a great change from beer and cask wine!

technorati top 100

I've actually looked through all 100 of the top site listed in technorati, and even followed some interesting links that I've bookmarked. Some are really dreadful, some so plain that you wouldn't know hat you were on someone blog. Of the 35 sites that I've put into flickr as having some aesthetical appeal to me, my favourite overall site would have to be xiaxue. Pink is not a colour I'm particularly drawn to, but I really like the graphic on the page and the typography works well with it. Variety of the blog entries is added by the use of bold, all caps, italicised etc type, as her entries are about her life, she types them as she'd speak them. Here's her site

engadget

Ok, 1st site of the Technorati top 100 and I get a blog that is a commercial site!!?? Okay they say that they're not, that they're purpose is "we're here to keep you informed about what's up", but at first glance commercial appears to be what they're all about. Turns out their digital everything reviewers/advisors and a way for like-minded digital geeks (no offence intended) to communicate with the team at Engadget and each other. I though blogs were a personal thing - product reviews seem, to me, to fall outside this definition. Do I have to review my definition? Or can blogs have a multitude of purposes?

Bohemian Rhapsody

One of the greatest songs ever! Youtube has the original video and soundtrack. the video's not great, but the music sure is!

Technorati

The diffrence between Technorati and a search engine is in the way they search content. The Help in Technorati refers to this difference as live vs wide; the live engine is Technorati, whose tools cause it to be notified of new content as it happens. A wide search engine, such as Google, searches static, inactive material, occasionally searching for new content. "Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time." In addition to being places for people to use as diaries many blogs are reviews of current affair items - news, gossip and technology to name a few. On the Popular page there are links to show users the most popular links (from within blogs, I think) to sites about music, videos, movies, games, DVDs, news and blogs
I have Authority: 1 · Rank: 2,090,250 - Woohooo

In addition, Technorati allows you to save favourites within the program, different to a search engine whose pages can be saved in your browsers favourites

piano juggler

No, this guy doesn't juggle pianos, he plays the piaqno by juggling balls... quite clever!

Hotel California

Yes, another favourite of mine, definitely a classic! One of the few songs I know all the lyrics to without faltering, or forgetting what verse I'm up to LOL

aesthetics

This myspace site is stunning in its ugliness. It's garish, extremely busy and the content is almost impossible to read. The background is static, so even when trying to read, the type is moving over new parts of the background, contributing strongly to its unreadability. Magically disappearing and reappearing type is distracting and the font used with it so elaborate that there isn't enough time to read what's flashing the first couple of times.The links down the left hand side of the page in the "interests" are indistinct - it's hard to find where one ends and the next begins. The type is in all caps, nullifying the advantage of using a sans serif font (increasedreadability than a serif font on a screen).

This site, however is relatively plain, but has a strong design. It's purpose is "The main idea is to provide information for new media designers, graphic designers, creative people, and also to any of you who take a keen interest in the area of creative industry and its aspects. We also would like to see designers throughout the world sharing their ideas, knowledge and inspiration." The sections within a page are clearly deliniated, the colour palette limited and bright and the font is a good size and highly readable. Navigation is simple, there is no horizontal scroll and the whole site is bright and clear with plenty of white space. I like it.

RSS reader account

I looked into both Bloglines and Google Reader and couldn't work out what, if any, the differences were between them. At first I though it might have been the ability of Bloglines to add images, but was able to do so in Google, so that can't be it. I decided to go with Google Feeder becasue of the linking between Google products.
I can't seem to link my Google Feeder account to anything because the URL is generic - it doesn't link to me specifically. I think this is becasue as a feeder account it's not designed to be read by anybody but the account holder. I did note that ability to email items from the account's page though, so maybe this is in lieu of a URL link.

Those were the days part 2

The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... (the first part)
My third place was in Lakemba. My boyfriend didn’t come with me, but a friend of his did move in – I was still an apprentice, someone had to help pay the rent. This fellow was of a fairly traditional Greek family and my now ex-boyfriend knew his family well. Shame he didn’t tell me what a pig he was! Do the dishes? Sweep the carpet in his room (didn’t have a vacuum in those days)? Do anything else domestic? Forget it – “women’s work”!! Needless to say, this particular flatmate didn’t last real long. Good thing? I got to know that upstairs neighbours when I went to ask if I could borrow their vacuum to clean out the foot of dust and crap that he’d left behind in his room.

My next flatmate was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, although I knew her as well. She was the sister of my exe’s best mate, who I got on really well with. This mate begged me, (and so did his mother) to let this girl stay with me; someone to look after her… I went looking for some knickers in her room one day, mine seemed to have gone missing and I found a desert-sized spoon in one of her drawers. I should add at this point that this girl was a heroin addict and my proviso on her living with me was that she didn’t use in the flat. I confronted her and she broke down, promised to never do it again etc etc. Anyone who knows an addict (I hadn’t before) will know that such a promise is worthless. At one stage she asked me if her boyfriend could move in and took some efforts to persuade me. I didn’t know him and the flat was small, so I kept saying no. Good thing I did… I got a call from the police one night; her boyfriend was actually her pimp and I was advised to stay away from him. How they knew me, or the fact that this girl was living with me and bringing her boyfriend home for visits I still to this day don’t know. But I not long after asked her to move out. I found out several years later that she died, alone, on her 21st birthday in a flat in Kings Cross from; you guessed it, a heroin overdose. Apparently the stuff she had bought was too pure and the overdosed was accidentally.

My third flatmate in Lakemba, where I lived for all of a year, was someone who would move with me for years to come. The atmosphere in Lakemba in those days was pretty tense; I live 4 apartment blocks down from a public school, which was regularly burnt-out. One of the girls living in the apartments across from our driveway was a teacher there and her stories of being sworn at in Lebanese, and the treatment she received from the Lebanese boys she taught were enough to curl your hair. I used to stack shelves in the supermarket as a 2nd job and walk to the station to go to work, so I was in the main street of Lakemba quite a lot. Not a great place to be if you were blond, young slim and pretty (yes, I was once). I used to cop a lot from the men standing in shop doorways. On one occasion while in the flat I was lying in bed, reading, naked, with my cat, when a hand stuck itself through my venetian blinds (no screens but the windows key-locked open about 3 inches wide) and watched me. I couldn’t reach the light to turn it off without revealing myself, so I threw my book at the blind and yelled and screamed. I was living with the Greek guy at the time and when I later confronted him, he said that he thought I was yelling at the cat……….. So much for having a male on hand for safety!

Another eventful occurrence was when I was living alone in the flat (in-between flatmates) and I’d gotten into bed when the phone rang, it was the friends upstairs who said they’d spotted a guy lurking around my ground-floor flat. Don’t panic and keep talking like you’re still on the phone was their advice to me before they hung up and phoned the police. I hung up and called my mother, all the while talking like I knew nothing. By the time the police got there, they’d gone of course; in fact guys trying to get away from someone or something often jumped the fences between the blocks of flats down that stretch of road. I had a cat, given to me by my boyfriend, for company and during the times I was living alone she’d be my ‘guard dog’. My flat was alongside the driveway and on the other side of that was the neighbouring fence and some shrubbery, then next-door flats. She used to raise her hackles and growl, and I knew that there was someone watching me, so I could lock the door out on to the balcony and pull the blinds. I’m sure that she saved me several times during my yearlong stay in that flat.
part 3

Sadomasochism!?

Hungappa had an article entitled "Power Exchange" in week 2's edition which caught my eye, and me, being who I am, decided to do some research on the subject and share it with you. (Sorry, can't provide a link 'cause it's not online yet - shame Hungappa, shame)

Hungappa refers to sadomasochism in the first instance as 'power exchange'. Other aliases include B&D, 'bondage and discipline', S&M, 'sadism and masochism', 'slave and master', D&S, "dominance and submission and the term I'll be using; bdsm.

To quote a very interesting article "SM is fantasy-sharing, which can only be consensual."and "But that's exactly what SM is: discovering and playing with our limits." - Hence Hungappa's use of 'power exchange'.

Photographer of bdsm, Barbara Nitke comments: "Communicating the reality of s/m interaction is challenging, in part because so much of what happens in s/m runs directly counter to everything we've been taught about sex, intimacy, love, and pleasure. Tenderness experienced through whipping? Personal empowerment through submission? Intimacy through abandonment? Pleasure through pain? What strange ideas these are to people who have no personal experience with s/m, and never witnessed others in the throes of a transformative s/m scene. And yet all of these dynamics are all utterly familiar, powerfully important, and quite matter-of-factly real to anyone who has made s/m play a significant part of his or her personal and sexual life." Maybe that's why popular media has iconicised bdsm for so long, usually in an aggressive or humourous light - it is so hard for non-practicing people to conceptualise.

Psychology Today states that psychologist Roy E Baumeister believes that masochism is a way of taking a breather from 'the self'; having to be the self-reliant, in control, responsible and driven. By having someone else control what's happening, you are getting a break from all that every-day stress. Interestingly, the article states that it's usually the priveledged 'classes' that are drawn to masochism; society's real victims don't go looking for masochistic sex. It also states that it's men who are most commonly looking to be sex slaves! Submission (societal, and sexual) is historically a feminine thing and "if anything, female masochists desire to be turned into an extreme caricature version of femininity, something far removed from their normal selves."

Often associated with sex toys it seems the possibilities that are open to bdsm's are infinite.

I have been on the internet actively reading and searching for information relating to bdsm for about 4 hours, and to try and encapsulate what bdsm is and what it means is impossible - it means different things to different people and there are so many things tied up (no pun intended) with it - leather fetishes, catheterisation, fisting, same-sex relationships, clubs, fetishes involving urine and faeces.... I have neither the time, nor the space to venture further into this unusual world. Here are a few links that can take you further if you so choose - http://www.geocities.com/stheory/contents.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadism_and_masochism.

Wikipaedia, in its usual manner have numerous links throughout their articles, which in turn have links and so on in the true manner of the web. Have fun perusing. Me? I'm thankful that I'm vanilla (you'll have to look that one up kiddies) - it's all too complicated!

Definition RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication is the most accepted definition) is a family of web-feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content such as news feeds or blogs. A Web feed is a data format used for serving users who frequently update their digital content, which can be syndicated thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.

Its value lies in the fact that by way of software known as 'feed aggregators', users can to subscribe to web feeds. Aggregators reduce the time a user needs to stay online to perform tasks, such as get news or blog updates, that they do on a regular basis. By way of the user's aggregator software the sites the users wants to regularly check on are combined into a "personal newspaper" where all updates are announced. These sites need to have an RSS feed in order for this to happen.

In order for a site to be accessed by RSS feed the language used to write it must be XML.